General Public and PPGIS on-line Surveys

Cultural Services - WP5 | Wessex BESS

Our survey of the general public was the largest single data collection exercise for the cultural ecosystem services work package and was completed in summer/autumn 2015. A team of 11 surveyors, co-ordinated and managed by Wiltshire Wildlife Trust interviewed 550 members of the public in a wide range of locations in and around the Wessex BESS area and immediately adjacent towns.

The survey collected data on people’s activities in and interactions with landscapes and biodiversity in and around the Wessex BESS study, on their attitudes and preferences with regards to local landscapes and biodiversity and on how people derive benefit and well-being from them, as well as socio-economic and demographic data. Analysis of the data has now commenced and will allow us to identify associations and relationships between socio-economic and demographic indicators, and how people interact with and derive benefit from biodiversity in the Wessex BESS landscapes. It should also shed light on the various ways in which people derive this benefit, such as the positive effect on physical and mental health.

Although less detailed than the face-to-face street survey, the PPGIS survey also collects data on people’s activities in the Wessex BESS landscapes and on their landscape preferences (on the arable/semi-natural grassland gradient). It is however more explicitly spatial, inviting the public to indicate on a map locations that they like to visit and to explain why they visit, what they do there, why they like the location, what meaning it has for them and what benefits they get from visiting.

Farmer interviews

!doctypeWhilst the general public benefit from cultural ecosystem services, farmers are key in making the environmental settings in which they are produced, and in so doing they have to strike a balance or make a trade-off between different service options such as food/fuel/fibre versus biodiversity versus landscape quality. In order to understand farmers’ perspectives on the above trade-offs and to what extent their views and perspectives on benefits from biodiversity in the Wessex BESS landscape coincide with or differ from the public, we are currently undertaking interviews with a range of farmers in and around the Wessex BESS area.

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